To mark the 350th anniversary of Jews in America, the Jewish
Federation of New Haven (Connecticut) joined forces with the city’s
Long Wharf Theatre. Together they staged readings of plays by American Jews.
Opening the recent three-day event was Donald Margulies’ “The
Loman Family Picnic,” with the playwright himself on hand for a follow-up
discussion. Besides Margulies’ “Family Picnic,” the series
included Clifford Odets “Awake and Sing,” and Sylvia Regan’s “Morning
Star.”

“The work of a dramatist is to take what you know and
raise the stakes, change that into something dramatic,” says Margulies,
acknowledging that his own family background has had a profound influence
on his work.

Margulies, whose body of work spans thirty years (including
his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Dinner With Friends”) now has
a new play, “Brooklyn
Boy,” opening on Broadway. Focusing on a novelist struggling with family
problems, this play, too, has the ring of personal truth and personal experience.

“The Loman Family Picnic” deals with a middle-class Jewish-American
family—father, mother, two sons (similar to the one in which Margulies
was raised)—who live in a Brooklyn high-rise apartment house. Though
the Lomans are preparing happily for the older son’s bah-mitzvah, it
soon becomes apparent that all is not well in high-rise heaven. The father
struggles to pay the bills, the mother fantasizes about another life, the
boys react unhappily to the family tensions. Margulies manages to make the
story hilarious and touching and searingly believable. He writes about trapped
people and the devastatingly materialistic world in which they live. The
multi-layered piece carries the sting of satire.

It was a play in which Margulies
risked experimentation.

”With this play I broke all kinds of rules.
Stream of consciousness, breaking the fourth wall, bursting into song,
ghosts appearing and interacting
were all part of this particular play. It required it.”

That Margulies uses the family name Loman is no accident.
He acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Arthur Miller, who also created a
troubled family
in “Death of a Salesman.” But Miller was careful, in those post-war
years, not to make his characters clearly Jewish, as Margulies, in a later
period, had no hesitancy in doing.

“When this play began to present itself, I found that
the shadow of Arthur Miller loomed tremendously over this play….and,
rather than deny that fact, I decided to embrace it,” Margulies says.

Long
Wharf’s co-artistic director Kim Rubinstein opened the follow-up
discussion by asking the playwright if the work was autobiographical.

Well,
yes and no, it seems.

“I took the essence of the experience of having grown
up in a house very much like this, but I decided to raise the stakes,” Margulies
replied, acknowledging that he could not have written the play, however,
while his parents were still alive.

“When I was growing up, the Holocaust and the Depression loomed palpably
in my house,” Margulies continued. “The scars of the Depression
on my parents were terrible. That interested me in all my plays—the
legacy that parents instill in their children, intentionally or otherwise.”

But
the Margulies legacy also included a love of theater.

“My family didn’t go to synagogue; they went to Broadway,” he
explained. “My father loved the Broadway musical. We would listen to
cast albums on Sunday mornings. At nine my first play was “A Thousand
Clowns” by Herb Gardner. A great introduction!”

And when Rubinstein asked, “Do you think of yourself as an ethnic
writer (that is, a Jewish writer)?” he replied, “I think of myself
as a writer foremost.”

But he continues, “I believe that writers have to tell the truth
as they know it”….

and his work is often Jewish “when the
story demands it.”

But in the specific is the universal. “You don’t have to be
Jewish to understand this family,” he said.

When asked if playwriting
was a personal catharsis, Margulies replied, “I
don’t write plays to expiate guilt. I write plays because I want to
illuminate the experience of life….for everybody.”